Shirogane Shio
Shirogane Shio (潮白銀, lit. Silver-white Tide) is a tokubetsu jōnin of Kirigakure, and a member of the once-illustrious Shio Clan. Background Shirogane was born to a poor Shio family within Kirigakure, and was forced to live on the streets for much of his life, stealing food to survive. He scraped out a living alongside his four siblings, of whom he was the only one to reach adulthood. He snuck into academy grounds regularly, "borrowing" lesson books, spare tools, and similar items, as well as spying on lectures. Once his parents deemed him ready, they began to teach him to compress his chakra, a great boon to his shinobi skills. Training as much as his underfed diet would allow, he eventually reached the level of some genin. At this point, his parents used what little they had in reserve to bribe an academy teacher to allow him to enter the exams. He graduated quite well, with unorthodox brawling taijutsu, some skills in basic ninjutsu, and a bit of aptitude with genjutsu and written knowledge. After he entered the shinobi forces, he immediately funneled all his paychecks straight to his parents, hoping to elevate them from their wretched circumstances. However, he was too late; his parents contracted malaria and died in the damp marshes south of Kirigakure. Personality Shirogane Shio is possessed of a calm, cheery disposition. However, he wears this as a mask to hide his depression over the death of his parents and his isolation amid a massive village. He grows attached easily to those who willingly associate with him, to the point of agonizing over what they think of him when he makes the slightest misstep. Shirogane holds himself to high standards, framing his unreasonably high standards as "what his parents would have wanted," hiding his inferiority complex. He sees himself as inferior to both of his teammates, who are less intelligent, but more conventionally powerful. He simultaneously is terrified of both failure and disappointing his comrades and the shades of his parents, leading him to alternate between working extremely hard towards his goals and being paralyzed with depression. As bullying and taunting are not unknown to him, it is difficult to rile him up or get him to drop his mask. However, in those few occasions when he is provoked to that point, he is overcome with rage and seeks only the destruction of his source of anger. Sometimes he is even so overcome with rage and anger that he loses memory of what occurred while he was emotionally compromised, as a sort of coping mechanism. However, there are several medium-sized craters in the Land of Water as testaments to his power when unchecked. Appearance Shirogane is of middling height, slightly on the short side, with wild dark hair. He incidentally does not own a comb, instead whacking his hair with his hands to attempt to have it stay down. He wears his village symbol on his belt, leaving his forehead clear, although this does cause problems with his bangs getting into his eyes. However, he refuses to wear his forehead protector protecting his forehead, as another one of his vague habits he attributes to his parents, although they had little or nothing to do with it. On his torso, he wears a simple loose t-shirt, along with a favorite beige jacket. This beige jacket comes with an array of straps, pockets, and buckles, and Shirogane nearly always keeps it rolled up past his elbows to expose his muscular forearms. He keeps everything in the various pockets of this jacket, and never takes it off outside of the comfort of his own apartment; his teammates theorize there is some seal matrix lining the pockets that allows him to keep the volume of equipment inside that he does. Physically, Shirogane is relatively slight in build, but with significant muscles in his forearms and legs due his brawling, knife-hand taijutsu techniques. Abilities Nature Transformation Shirogane pushed himself to learn a nature transformation after his teammates learned some of their respective elemental techniques. Not having the means or initiative to locate a source of chakra paper, he banked on water ninjutsu; there was a good chance of him wielding that affinity and it had the most tutors in Kirigakure. He only really learned a handful of techniques, not by theory but by repetition; the one he used the most was the Water Release: Water Severing Wave. Clan Techniques Here is the one area Shirogane Shio excelled. Having been taught at a young age to compress his chakra, he held onto that skill as one of the few things that set him apart as well as one of the few extant links to his parents. Shirogane practiced the technique obsessively, seeing it as his escape from inferiority and the imagined disdain of his teammates. He reverse engineered the Dream Eater Technique, being able to use his own unusually rational and imaginative mind to exploit genjutsu and overthrow them with his own, powerful chakras, before turning them on their caster. This vicious loop can destroy opponents, as when Shirogane utilized this on lower level genjutsu users, they would be unable to remove themselves from their own genjutsu, and Shirogane could step out of the loop and have free rein against the incapacitated opponent. Shirogane also learned another Shio technique, the Invasion Technique, which was a supposed prerequisite to learning the Dream Eater, but he had skipped. Therefore, he learned this more widely-applicable version in a matter of weeks. Quotes Trivia References Category:Shio Clan